“In response
to their initial disappointment with the president’s
early performance, many progressives speculated that
Obama was just waiting for a second term to be more
liberal,” he said. That was true. They were.

Eleveld
continued: “A more likely explanation is that Obama
was still finding his groove, figuring out which
levers worked best for him in the context of
governing the nation. And in some ways, he was still
developing the courage of his convictions.”

That, it turns
out, was false. He wasn’t.

You can’t
develop convictions that you don’t have in the first
place.

It’s hard to
remember now, more than six weeks later, but there
was once a time (six long weeks ago) when liberal
Democrats who naïvely chose to ignore Obama’s
consistently conservative first term, his
consistently conservative career in the Senate, and
his consistently conservative pre-politics career as
a University of Chicago law professor, seriously
believed that his reelection would lead to a
progressive second term.

“It’s time for
President Obama to assume the Roosevelt-inspired
mantle of muscular liberalism,” Anthony Woods
wrote in The Daily Beast. “This is his moment.
He only has to take it.”

It’s his
moment, all right. And he’s taking it. But when it
comes to Obama, liberals are once again guilty of
some major wishful thinking. Obama’s economic
policies are closer to Herbert Hoover than Franklin
Roosevelt.

“With
re-election safely behind him, we hope Obama will be
bolder in his second term,” Peter Dreier and Donald
Cohen
wrote in The Nation.

Again with the
Hope!

Change, not so
much.

Race doesn’t
matter. Looks don’t matter. Age doesn’t matter.
Style doesn’t matter. Only one thing matters when
you’re electing a politician: policy. And the
willingness and ability to carry it out. Everything
you needed to know about Barack Obama boils down to
the fact that he voted
nine times out of ten to fund the Iraq war, at
the same time that he was giving speech after speech
pretending to oppose it. And that was before he won
in 2008.

It didn’t take
long for Obama to sell out the liberal base of his
party the first time. Everything became clear in
December 2008, when his cabinet picks didn’t include
a single liberal. Well, here it is, December 2012,
and can’t get fooled again but we did, as George W.
Bush would sorta say.

Wait a minute:
I thought Obama was a Democrat. So why is he
appointing a Republican as secretary of defense? Not
just a Republican, but a homophobe? In 1998
Republican Senator Chuck Hagel criticized President
Clinton’s nominee for ambassador to the sensitive
strategic hotbed of Luxembourg not only for being
gay, but for being “openly,
aggressively gay.” Gay rights groups demanded
that Hagel “repudiate” his bigoted comments, and he
dutifully
did so, but the point is that a truly
progressive Democratic president would never have
appointed a gay-bashing right-wing Republican in the
first place. Yeah, America has changed, but it
wouldn’t be that hard to find a liberal Democrat who
thought gays and lesbians were real human beings
back in 1998.

The “fiscal
cliff” negotiations have led to another replay of
Obama’s 2008 sellout, this one on economic fairness.
Throughout the 2012 campaign the president promised
to raise taxes on the top 2% of American households,
those earning over $250,000 a year. As of November 9th
he was still “sticking
to his guns,” calling his stance nonnegotiable.
On December 17th, however, without the
defeated Republicans even having to propose a
counteroffer, Obama pulled a classic Democratic
negotiating-against-himself maneuver. Not only did
he offer House Speaker John Boehner to protect the
spectacularly wealthy taxpayers who earn
up to $400,000 from a tax hike, he quietly sold
out senior citizens by gutting the current system
that calculates cost-of-living increases for Social
Security and other federal entitlement programs.

At first, few
people would notice Obama’s switch to a so-called
“chained consumer price index.” (Under the new
system, if the price of steak goes up, the
government assumes you’ll switch to hamburger—so it
doesn’t count as inflation.) This year, for example,
the inflation rate under the chained CPI is 0.3%
less. But inflation is exponential and the effect is
cumulative. By the time you hit age 92, you’d lose
an entire month of Social Security benefits each
year.

This,
remember, was the president who was supposed to bust
out as an FDR-style crusading liberal ready, willing
and able to fight the right-wing Republicans and
stand up for ordinary Americans.

The good news
is, the anticipation is over. Liberals who
worried that Obama would sell them out need
worry no more. Not so deep down, they knew this
would happen. Now they can settle down for four more
years of depressing Republican-lite kowtowing to
corporations and the one percent.

I know what
they’re thinking. Things would be even worse if Mitt
Romney had won.

I wouldn’t be
so sure.

Policy-wise, a
Romney administration would have been pretty much
the same as Obama’s second term. Who knows, he might
have picked Chuck Hagel as Defense Secretary.

In terms of
building the political Left, a President Romney
would have galvanized liberals and progressives to
fight for a fairer society that treats everyone
equally and with dignity. Obama, his sellouts, and
his faux liberal apologists represent two steps
backwards for progressivism.

(Ted
Rall is the author of “The
Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change
to the Age of Revolt.” His website is tedrall.com.)

In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)